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Do I need to unlock the multiplier

All,

I have an Athalon 950MHZ on its way to my house along with and EPOX 8K3A+ mobo with PC2700 memory.

Now I may have the specifics wrong and if so correct me but here is my thought.

The Athalon 950 runs at a native 100 MHZ FSB. My system, beside the cpu, should be able to run at 166+fsb. Since my processor is going to max out much earlier than my mobo, is there any reason to unlock the processor?

All you need to do is connect the L1 bridges with a pencil...I've never had a problem with the pencil not holding the charge. Just go back and forth a lot to get a lot of graphite on there. www.overclockers.com might have a better article than tom's...although I think I used tom's. Anyway yes...you want a high fsb and a low multi. Try getting your fsb as high as possible Anyway...good luck and happy clocking!

You know. A pencil. Those funny yellow cilinders about 6" long with rubber apperatous at one end for deleting data, and another end with a point. It is filled with an odd meterial called graphite, that is black in collor and usually used for making marks on surfaces such as partchment.

Yes a standard No2 pencil will do the trick. Graphite is slightly conductive and that is all that is needed to reconnect the bridges on the CPU. The XP versions are locked a bit better. They burned a larger hole that leads to a grounding material. If you do not fill in the hole with a non-conductive material befor reconnecting the bridges, it will ground out and lock it to 11x (if I recall right). They also require a matterial slightly less resistant that graphite, but a few have been able to get graphite to work.

I did the pencil trick a long time ago on my Duron 600 and upped my multiplier to 8x and my bus speed to 112Mhz for 896Mhz. Your 950 likely has aluminum interconnectors and will only overclock to about 1.0-1.1Ghz, but your system and memory will likely run fine at 166MHz bus. You likely should be able to run 6x with no trouble and 6.5 to 7.0 is a good possibility.